This is the latest post in a
series about Bertrand
Russell's essay
Why I am not a Christian, in which I run through his various
arguments and show that for the most part (there are a few exceptions)
they either don't apply to
classical theism, or they don't apply to any form of theism. The
first part of Russell's essay discussed the existence of God; the second
part the moral character and wisdom of Jesus. Russell concludes with a
number of more general issues. The first of these is to ask why so many
people do believe in Christianity. Having convinced himself that there are
no good rational grounds for belief, Russell searches for some
irrational grounds for belief.

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has
anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional
grounds.

So begins Russell in this section. He labels the section "The Emotional
Factor." It is a slightly strange beginning to
a section that is mainly about supposed moral evil committed by Christians. But
before I discuss that, it is worth commenting on this short statement. I
see three major errors in these two sentences. Firstly, it is a false
dichotomy. There is no reason why argumentation and emotion need be
opposed to each other. Christianity brings with it a great internal joy
and peace, but that doesn't supplant reason. Rather, it works together
with reason.

One criticism that is often, rightly, levied at people such as myself who
focus on the rational basis of religion is that we make God impersonal and
distant, little more than a philosophical curiosity. But the Christian God
is there to be experienced. He is personal, close, and calls out in
friendship. Equally, there are those who focus on the experience of God
and are somewhat dubious in their rationality. In some ways, that is
good; reason is always built on premises which can be disputed, while
experience trumps that. But no less than those who emphasise the
rationality of religion, it misses out on an important part of
Christianity. Jesus satisfies our whole person, both emotion and mind,
and so both approaches are needed together. Ideally, this would be done
by the same person. But since we all have our own strengths and weaknesses,
it is more often done as a team; one partner emphasising the rational seeds
of Christianity, and another the emotional harvest.

The second problem is that this statement is an over generalisation. There
is not one single reason why people become and remain Christian. Yes,
there are those who were just brought up in the habit of going to Church
and have simply stuck with it not really knowing why; or who go to Church
just for the respectability or social life. But I also know people who
came to Christ through experiences of miracles or visions; who find
the evidence for the resurrection overwhelming; who are impressed by the
moral change they observe in others and then experience in themselves;
who are uplifted by and touched by God during Christian worship; who
appreciate the clear principles of Christianity as opposed to the
confusion of the secular world; who appreciate the close community and
loving spirit of the churches; who are drawn to the coherence,
profundity and agreement with experience of Christian doctrine; who
are drawn by the standard rational arguments for God such as the
cosmological argument and teleological argument; others from the authority
of people they respect; and there are a host of
other reasons as well (including some less wholesome ones such as lust
for power, influence or to save face). For me, it is a combination of
several of these. But there is one thing that all Christians have in
common: they are Christians because they understand the evidence to show,
or at the very least strongly suggest, that Christianity is true.

This raises a problem. Christians present that evidence to atheists,
and what is overwhelming to the Christian the atheist dismisses out of
hand. Why is this? It is not due to difference of intelligence; there
have been some highly intelligent Christians and some highly stupid
atheists (and, of course, vice versa). In part, it is due to ignorance.
Not meaning lack of knowledge as such, but rather lack of some particular
brands of knowledge. Most atheists (not all), for example, have only a
limited grasp of theistic philosophy and thus don't understand the
strongest arguments for Christianity, or how a Christian would answer
their objections. Most Christians (not all) have a more limited grasp of
the philosophers which atheists rely on, and thus don't understand the
strongest objections to theism, or how an atheist would answer their
responses. When it comes to collecting evidence, once we move out of the
hard sciences, there is always room for dispute. So the secularist will
draw out some research paper which supposedly proves whatever
anti-Christian fashion happens to be prevalent at the time, and the
Christian will point out that it uses too small a sample or the sampling
method is clearly biased. The Christian will pull out their own research
paper, and the atheist will claim that it was insufficiently well controlled
and doesn't really address the question in hand, but only some proxy variable.
In reality, of course, both studies are seriously flawed, and neither should
be accepted (such is the way of the social sciences).

But the main reason is that Christians come from a theistic world-view,
with its own premises and definitions, and atheists from their own
world-view with a different set of premises and definitions. The arguments
that Christians put forward contradict the atheist premises (and are
misunderstood because for the atheists, the words have different meanings),
and so the atheist finds the Christian arguments implausible and dismisses
them out of hand. Equally, when the Christian encounters an atheist argument,
they are usually (not always) found to be laughably bad and trivial to
solve; because the issue is merely a contradiction between the understanding
of terms as the atheists define them, while for the theist with their
slightly different definitions and mode of reasoning, there is no
difficultly at all.

But isn't atheist philosophy built on science but theistic philosophy
built on pre-scientific superstition? I
would strongly disagree. From what I can see, it the classical
philosophy behind theism, built on the fundamental principles of change
and constancy, which is far more closely aligned with quantum physics than
the various modern philosophies which arose from either Newtonian physics
or out of date ideas about epistemology which bear little relation to how
today's scientists actually proceed.

How we view the evidence depends on
the assumptions we bring to it. It is easy to say that we should let the
evidence -- the whole evidence -- judge our assumptions than the other way
round, but much harder to do. If you look at the evidence for the
resurrection of Jesus with the philosophical prejudice that miracles are
impossible (ultimately arising from a set of premises that can and ought
to be disputed),
then you will dismiss it before you start. If you come with an open and
inquiring mind, then you might well be swayed. Of course, the purpose of
an open mind is that you can close it again around the truth.

Russell continues:

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion,
because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

I would also strongly disagree that religion makes men virtuous. Certain
religions are well known for leading people away from virtue. The Aztecs
practised human sacrifice; the Molech worshippers sacrificed even their
own children to placate their God. The warlord son of Abdullah raised
followers to his religion by
promising them the wealth of the tribes he conquered and their women to divide
among themselves for their pleasure. We are far better off without such
religions. Even if we restrict ourselves to those religions which (when
honestly proclaimed) are built on good moral values, even here I would
dispute that those religious rituals make the followers virtuous. That is
not what Christianity teaches. Righteousness is the gift of God, and no
amount of religion can help us become what we need. Good education in the
virtues helps; the Holy Spirit helps more.

This means, of course, that we should not expect anyone to be virtuous
just because they are prominent in some Church or another. There have been
times when the Church has held great political power. And here, as in all
political organisations, we should expect the scum to rise to the top.
Rather, it is those who are not noticed, who do what Jesus asked and give
food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcome to the stranger, aid to
the sick and those in prison; they are the ones closest to Christ, not
those in robes, with sticks, hats and palaces.

Russell could point to many Churchmen who were vile people. A hundred
years later, and we can point to many more. I need not list examples;
they are well enough known already. But it is not being men and women of
the Church that makes them vile; it is that they are men and women. It is
common to humanity. I can equally cite plenty of Buddhists, Hindus,
Muslims, atheists and agnostics who were and are utterly evil; but what
does that prove? Put people in power, and they invariably abuse it in one
way or another, no matter what creed they profess. It doesn't matter if
that power is in parliament, the universities, or the Church.

But doesn't Christianity promise to make people better? Not quite. It
promises to make those who genuinely repent, hold to the true faith (true
to within the precision allowed by reasonable Biblical interpretation in
matters relating to salvation), and seek to humble themselves in agape
love, better. One can profess oneself as a Christian while not repenting.

But isn't this just the no true Scotsman fallacy? Then again, the Spanish
Inquisition weren't, as far as I am aware, true Scotsmen. It is not
Christians on trial, but Christianity. The question is whether such
actions conformed with the teaching and example of Jesus. If they did,
then Christianity can certainly be criticized. If not, then how can such
deeds be attributed to Christianity rather than the common evil of
humanity? All it would demonstrate would be that Christianity is impotent
in some cases if badly practised, not that it is untrue.

But doesn't Christianity divide people into factions, and thus lead to
this sort of violence? Again, people don't need Christianity as an
excuse for division. The older racists divided people into racial groups,
and pit one against another. The modern anti-racists do the same (one
thing I notice about the anti-racist movement is that they start from
mostly the same flawed assumptions as the racists; they just run with them
in a different direction). Marxists
divide people into classes, and imagine an eternal class war. Villages
divide themselves into tribes, and wage a genuine tribal war. Politicians
divide themselves into parties, and hate each other solely based
on their preferred colour of rosette (certainly I see no other difference
of note between Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameroon and Theresa May).
People naturally divide themselves into groups. And yet, when I walk into
a Church, whether catholic or evangelical, of whatever denomination,
where the congregation live by solid Biblical principles and moral code,
none of these things matter. They are simply not relevant.

So yes, there are divisions in the Church. But there are divisions
everywhere. There are evil people in the church. But there are vile perverts
everywhere. Should not the Church be better than society? But I would
contend that it is better, at least once you ignore the headline-makers
and go down into the local congregations. Certainly, if I visit another
Church, I will respect
their traditions, and only participate in the service as far as my and
their consciences will permit. Such differences are important but there
are also similarities which are more important. Sure, I will debate
endlessly with my Roman brother
about justification by faith and the veneration of the saints, but then
we will go together to preach good news to the poor. The days of burning
each other at the stake are long gone, and good riddance to them.

The solution, of course, is to not divide people into groups. Each
person is their own individual, with their own beliefs, skills and
weaknesses. Rather than artificially claiming equality, acknowledge
each person and family as they are. Unity is built around recognising
differences and using them to work together for a common purpose; not about
pretending that people and beliefs which aren't equal are equal. The
Church opposes the modern dogma of equality. But it is the Church which
has its feet planted in reality; and modern society which is spinning of
into fantasy. For example, society claims that men and women are
interchangeable, and that there are no intrinsic differences between male
and female except for the obvious biological differences. That men dominate
the top reaches of the mathematical sciences and computing, and women dominate
other fields such as the social sciences and education, is an anathema to
such people because it conflicts with that assumption. Now, I am not
saying that we should assume that there are intrinsic differences, only
that we should let the evidence speak for itself. There are brilliant
female software engineers and mathematicians (many better than I am).
There are brilliant male
nurses and nursery school teachers. But the evidence strongly seems to
suggest that there are profound differences between men on average and
women on average. The majority of women (not all) have skills and characters which would
lead them in one direction, and the majority of men (not all) skills and characters
which would lead them in another. Why should we compel women to
become software developers if more of them have the talent and desire to
be nurses (I am just using these as hypothetical examples)? And why compel
men to be nurses when more of them have the
talent and desire to be software developers? Why try to force people to go in
directions they don't want to, and then proclaim discrimination the moment they
don't do what you think they ought to, just in the name of some unjustified
and unjustifiable concept of equality? Why not just choose the best people
for each job and let nature run its
course, rather than try to force it into some fantasy land?

True equality is to acknowledge that
each individual man and woman is their own person, with different strengths
and weaknesses, but ultimately of complementary talents which are of equal
worth to society and equally needed by society. That's why I am not a feminist.
Modern feminists hate the idea of a woman; they refuse to accept that a woman is
worth anything unless they are judged in the same society and by the same
measure as men. Equally, they hate the
concept of masculinity; and try to judge men according to standards best
applied to women. The Church surely gets this right: valuing men and women
as different, with complimentary roles in the family, Church and business,
and neither more or less important or valued than the other but each respected
for what they are and the vital roles they play.

Christianity teaches that we are like a body, each a different part but
working together. It recognises both of differences in gifts, abilities
and calling but unity in society. Is that not better than the modern
secular view, which sees us as equal in abilities, but divides us into
societal groups, demanding quotas based on race and sex, but not ability
and aptitude for the role in question?

That is the idea - that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the
Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it
have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact,
that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more
profound has been the dogmatic faith, the greater has been the cruelty and
the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith,
when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness,
there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of
unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty
practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

Really? Millions of women burnt? Most of the people holding to Christianity
extremely wicked? One senses a touch of exaggeration. So let us
look at his examples. The Inquisition and witch burnings were products of
the Renaissance (the time when the Christian medieval tradition was
neglected in favour of the more brutal pagan pre-Christian Roman tradition);
which is curious because that was when the Roman Church
was at its least Christian. One can only look at the abundant greed,
immorality, and superstition of the medieval popes to recognise that they
defied almost every aspect of Christian teaching. Why then should we be
surprised that they also ignored the command to love our enemies? Of course
if one were to look for the evil people of post Roman and pre-twentieth century
Europe, one would find that the majority of them claimed to be Christian,
simply because it was nearly impossible in that society to not claim oneself
as a Christian. But judge those men by the standards of Christianity, not
Christianity by the standards of those men.

Or one could cite the various attacks led by
the Church; the persecution of the Arians in the fifth century, for
example, or the crusades. But the persecution of the Arians was led by
the state, which desired religious unity. When the Arians held the power
of the Empire, the Christians were persecuted; when the Emperor professed
Trinitarian Christianity, then the Arians were persecuted; before this
the Empire persecuted anyone who denied the state pagan religion. It was
imperial power, not Christianity, which led to the assaults.

The crusades are more complex. Ultimately, they were a belated response
to four hundred years of Islamic oppression and attacks on Christendom.
There were constant raids on the coasts of Europe to feed the slave markets
of Tripoli. Rome itself was sacked by one raid. Christians in North Africa,
Spain, Mesopotamia and the Holy Land were reduced to an inferior class and
sometimes brutally persecuted,
merely meant to be grateful that, unlike the Hindus and Buddhists of India,
they were spared immediate execution. Now the Christian heartland of Asia
Minor had just been overrun by the Turk, amidst much torture and slaughter of
the native population. The
Eastern Empire sent a desperate request for aid. And,
after about six hundred years, Western Europe was finally strong enough
to respond. The newly converted Norsemen still hungered for their
traditions of war and battle.

Of course, I can't condone or excuse everything that the crusaders did;
the superstition that spurred them on; the way their purpose was perverted
from helping the East to pillaging it; the assaults on the Jews. But the
excesses of the crusaders
was opposed by the Church. The evil done at that time by the crusaders was
again human, just as the evil done by the Saracens and many others before
and since. It is easy for us to sit in our armchairs and condemn the
crusaders. Would we have done the same after the assault they had received?
Of course, once we stop ignoring the motivations of those responsible,
and start trying to understand the reasoning behind their atrocities, I
suspect that our modern post-Christian society would do worse.

If you want to look at the Church when it was most Christian, look back
to the earliest time; the first three hundred years. Look at the
persecuted Church rather than the persecuting church; the Church following
the example suffering set by Jesus rather than the church following the
example of torture set by Nero. You will struggle then to find any examples
of inquisition or witch burning, at least committed by the Christians.

You will find as you look around the world that every single bit of
progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every
step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment
of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress
that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the
organised Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the
Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is
the principle enemy of moral progress in the world.

I rarely annotate the margins of my books, but the first time I read this,
I did. My comment was simply, "Is he mad?" For I would say the opposite; that for close
to two thousand years the Church has led moral progress (at least in the
West), and that when the Church has been at its weakest, then that is
when society has morally regressed, not least in the last fifty or sixty
years.

Of course, what one means by moral progress depends on your view of
ethics. Many people would say that the changes in society in recent years
are good. But that depends on what you think makes something good.
If, like the modern world, you have no objective standard of goodness,
then the statement becomes irrational. To often debates in the modern
world say "We must have progress," without establishing whether the
change in question is progress or regress.

So let us look at a few of the examples cited (I don't have the space to discuss them all).

Slavery. We should not think that our modern world is typical. Almost
every civilisation in history has regarded slavery as part of the natural
order. It took a lot of effort and imagination to overcome that; a lot
of societal and economic inertia had to be repelled; and there
are frequent temptations trying to make society revert back to that state
or something similar to it. Many people desire power over others, and
logical culmination of such power is to own another as a slave. Feed that
desire, or neglect to actively starve it, and it will grow strong again.

There has been no institution more persevering in its
opposition to chattel slavery than the
Christian church. As soon as they gained power Christians led
campaigns to free and improve the conditions of slaves in the classical
world. That work was undone following the barbarian invasions, but
once the barbarians had been converted and settled down, the Church
began again, and effectively outlawed slavery in the middle ages. In
the renaissance period (when the Church was at its least Christian),
there was a brief lapse, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade began. The
African tribal leaders were used to selling their captives to the Muslims
across the Sahara as barter; now they offered them to the newly arrived
Spanish and
Portuguese in their boats. The need for cheap manpower to make the New
world colonies profitable (with opinion at home turning against the
enslavement and treatment of the native peoples) made it a too tempting offer. But then
the Church once again revived and got back to work, and repeated proclamations by the Roman Church
in 1537, 1591, 1639, 1741, 1839, 1890 and so on effectively ended the slave
trade in Catholic Southern Europe. In Northern Europe,
the slave trade and then slavery itself was defeated by a coalition of
Anglicans and Quakers, while Russell's predecessors who drifted towards secular
philosophy generally sat on their hands and did nothing. It was then the
colonial Empires and the might of the nineteenth century European navies which
forced abolition on the wider world. Only in North America
can the secularists claim some justification for Russell's claim, but
even here Christian principles played a leading role in abolition.
Secular philosophy always adapts to the latest fashion, and now the fashion
globally (thanks to Christianity) was for abolition.

War. Since when has the Church opposed efforts to prevent war? Certainly
there have been church-led wars, the crusades being the obvious example,
and wars fought over for religious principles, the thirty years war
being again only the most obvious example. But war has been a part of human history
since our earliest records. Look at the history of warfare of my own
country. How many of those were caused by religion? There are a few:
the crusades, the wars of the reformation, the Bishop's wars. But the
overwhelming majority (and even these to a certain extent) were over
grabs for land and resources, or disputes over political succession;
same as in the non-Christian parts of the world. (There have, of
course, been wars started to promote an atheistic ideology; the Russian
revolution and consequent civil war, or Chinese civil war, or Korean war
being the obvious examples).

Christianity, at least as it developed in the Western Churches (there
is a case for saying that until Constantine, Christianity was pacifist
in both theory and practice), is not
wholly pacifist. It sees war as an great evil, but not always the
greatest evil. There are, I think, only two circumstances when wars
might justly be waged: defence, either of oneself or an ally, or to
intervene to prevent or at least halt a slaughter of his own people
by a tyrant (something
similar to the holocaust or the Rwandan genocide). Even the crusades
were originally intended as a defence of the Eastern Christians
against Islamic attacks (as in Asia Minor) or assaults (as in the Holy
Land). There are additionally various rules to ensure that the evils
of war are limited as much as possible. Admittedly, these rules are
rarely followed (especially in the crusades).

It is difficult to think of any war in history that has met the
Christian just war criteria (even in the second world war, allied
treatment of German and Japanese civilian populations went too far).
War has existed in every culture and every part of human history. The
work of the Churches in that time has been to try to ameliorate and
lessen its effects. There has not been a vigorous anti-war movement
(as existed since the nineteenth century, albeit with many Christian
members and supporters), largely because the Church has recognised the
limitations of human nature. Today's pure pacifist is tomorrow's
victim of invasion and then genocide. The Christian position is
surely wiser: be ready to defend yourself and others, but never be
ready to attack. The Church's only failing in this regard is that its
never had enough influence over the Kings and Princes and Popes of
Europe to have this teaching followed.

Moral progress. We have seen what Russell thought of as "progress" has
led to. We no longer teach the virtues, and are surprised when people
turn out to be greedy, selfish and vicious. We teach boys and girls
that sex is solely for pleasure and consequence free, and are
surprised when men treat women as disposable items; surprised when
there are weekly sexual scandals; surprised when sexual diseases are rampant. We teach people
to experiment before marriage, and are surprised when there is nobody
capable of providing the stability that a family needs. We teach
people that they are worth it, and are surprised that nobody is able
to perform the self-sacrifice needed to live in a harmonious family.
We allow divorce on a whim, and are surprised when there are single
parent families trapped in welfare and child poverty and
underachievement. We promote contraception, and are surprised when people's
habit of promiscuity makes them unable to form stable relationships, and
the birthrate drops to a suicidal level. We teach people to demand
their rights above all; and are
surprised when they neglect their responsibilities. We teach children
that they shouldn't be bound by
traditional rules and don't need to graft to achieve in life, and are
surprised when they disrupt classes and ruin their own education. We
teach people that to be ethical is to seek consequences which maximise
the greater good, and
are surprised when individual needs are ignored and there is a culture
of rudeness, viciousness and bureaucratic box ticking. We teach people that the government
is more important than family, and are surprised when society grinds to
a halt under callous inefficiency and attempts to force individual local
needs into globalised boxes. We teach people that one's
worth is measured by what one owns (rather than the goodness of one's
character), and are surprised when there is rampant greed and
corruption. We teach people not to challenge other cultures and hate our own, and
are surprised when thousands of young girls are raped and assaulted in our
cities while the authorities stand back and do nothing to protect them
for fear of being labelled as racist.
We teach people that they have the right to do what they
will with their bodies (rather than the responsibility to do good for
their bodies and their children), and that they should live free of
responsibilities and are not surprised when millions
of innocents are murdered by the abortion industry (there is more blood on
this generation than there was on Hitler). We teach people to
experiment sexually, and that all types of relationships are the same,
and are surprised when children are assaulted and same sex attracted individuals suffer numerous
physical and mental health problems, and our parliament even hates them
so much that it would legislate to deny them the counselling and support
they need most.

If this is progress, then I am glad that the faithful remnant of the
Church has had no part in it. Of course it is not progress, but
an undoing of eighteen centuries of genuine moral progress and
reversion to pre-Christian chaos and moral anarchy. I just pray that
Western civilisation turns around and comes back to sound moral
principles before it collapses completely.

And what have the Christians been doing in this time while academia and
governments have been trying to force their moral regression on the world?
Building schools,
educating, tending the sick, supporting the poor, going out onto the
streets to comfort the drunk and lonely. Not just talking about how to
make the world worse, but genuinely making people's lives that bit
better.

Russell's claim that the organised Church has inhibited moral progress is
either historically inaccurate or begging the question. As shown in the
previous post, Russell himself can rationally have no objective standards
of morality. He is therefore in a poor position to judge which changes
amount to moral progress and which to moral regress. There is only one
means to an objective morality accessible through reason and observation,
and that is the natural law ethics championed by the Church.
Where Russell has
genuinely identified moral progress, the Church has supported it. Where
he has identified something the Church has opposed, that is not moral
progress but moral regress.

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